Posts filed under “Blog Spotlight”

We put together a short list of excellent but somewhat overlooked
blog that deserves a greater audience. Expect to see a post from a
different featured blogger here every Tuesday and Thursday evening,
around 7pm.

Next up in our Blogger Spotlight: Trader Feed, by
Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D.

Brett is Associate Clinical Professor of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University
in Syracuse, NY and author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003).
As Director of Trader Development for Kingstree Trading, LLC in
Chicago, he has mentored numerous professional traders and coordinated
a training program for traders. An active trader of the stock indexes,
Brett utilizes statistically-based pattern recognition for intraday
trading. Brett maintains an archive of articles and a trading blog at Trading Psychology and a blog of market analytics at Trader Feed. His book, Enhancing Trader Performance,
is due for publication this fall (Wiley).

We put together a short list of excellent but somewhat overlooked
blog that deserves a greater audience. Expect to see a post from a
different featured blogger here every Tuesday and Thursday evening,
around 7pm.

Next up in our Blogger Spotlight: James Picerno is the editor of The Capital Spectator (capitalspectator.com), a blog focused on economics and investment
strategy. He is also a senior writer for Wealth Manager, a trade
magazine for financial advisers to wealthy individuals. He has been a
financial journalist since the late-1980s.

The head of the self-proclaimed "authority on bonds" says the rate hikes are history. PIMCO’s Bill Gross wrote in his October Investment Outlook that "the Fed is done and ultimately will have to lower interest rates in order to restimulate an asset based/housing led economy that has been its primary growth hormone in recent years."

The underlying assumption in his projection is that inflation is "leveling off" and the economic growth rate is "moving towards a 2% real growth rate or less in the next year or so…." As such, the Fed "at some point in 2007 will be forced to cut short rates." Timing and magnitude are yet to be determined, he adds.

In fact, the future may be more complicated than it appears. Economist Robert Dieli of NoSpinForecast.com documents the finer points of this complexity by plotting the history of economic cycles against instances of inverted yield curves. As he illustrates in the chart below (which, alas, we’ve squeezed a bit from the original to fit into the confines of CS), there’s a lengthy history of yield-curve inversions accompanying economic contractions and a drop in the Fed funds rate shortly after the yield inversions arrived. But that doesn’t mean the past is prologue, at least not a prologue that’s clear and obvious.

This is another of our new features: Blogger’s Take. It is inspired by — a nice word for stolen — the WSJ’s Economist’s Take, which they post after major economic data releases.

We wanted to do something a bit more informal: Looking at different subjects a bit more in depth, and take in some perspectives from a broad variety of bloggers (as opposed to a narrow slice of Wall Street Dismal Scientists.

Here are our first half dozen responses to the question: "What Up With Employment?">

"A striking characteristic of the US non-farms job data since the trough of 2002 is that recovery growth is the weakest since records began in 1939 (uncertain BLS September revision notwithstanding). Even the brief and frail recovery between the 1980 and 1981 recessions was stronger. It may be that growth has not yet peaked – but that would make this jobs recovery the slowest to pan out on record.

Moreover, the latest non-farm payrolls data paints a picture of deterioration, particularly in construction and related industries. Whilst both the unemployment rate and hourly earnings data stuck out as good news, the fact is they are lagging indicators. The Fed has ammo to hold on this data; but should coming months show job losses (not outlandish) they might still choose to wait on clearer inflation (and BLS) data before contemplating the wisdom of cuts."

We put together a short list of excellent but somewhat overlooked
blog that deserves a greater audience. Expect to see a post from a
different featured blogger here every Tuesday and Thursday evening,
around 7pm.

Next up in our Blogger Spotlight: RJH Adams (known as Rawdon) of Capital Chronicle. Rawdon was raised in a tiny emerging economy, and his professional life began as a dogsbody at the UK’s economics and finance ministry, HM Treasury. He subsequently moved to the finance functions of multinationals Xerox (UK) and General Electric (France) learning from the inside what making quarterly numbers really involves. In 2000 he left and co-founded an investment vehicle. He lives in the French Alps splitting most of his time between raising three small occasionally charming children and reading about economic development and investment."

Today’s focus commentary looks at:

How good is the Baltic Dry Index as a proxy for global economic activity?

Conclusion: Still worth looking at – but with a proviso since 2006.

As
China moves in 2006 to being a consistent net exporter of steel its
influence over an important driver of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) – iron
ore for steel production – grows. But China’s massive growth in steel
output has come in large part though government intervention. This, to
some degree, is distorting the underlying freight rate picture.

To
what degree is key. The level and volatility of the BDI is influenced
not only by total commodity demand but also by fuel costs, seasonality,
fleet numbers, route bottlenecks and sentiment. These additional
factors should temper conclusions about the relevance of China’s steel
activities on the level of the BDI.

Discussion:The
BDI has in the past been helpful to assessing global economic activity.
It is, after all, a reflection of real prices paid to ship production
inputs across the globe. Since March this year the index has been on a
tear, rising 70%, or 1,750 points.

We put together a short list of excellent but somewhat overlooked
blog that deserves a greater audience. Expect to see a post from a
different featured blogger here every Tuesday and Thursday evening,
around 7pm.

Second up in our Blogger Spotlight: Michael Shedlock and Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis. Mike is one of the editors of The Survival Report, covering stocks and the economy. He also writes for the Daily Reckoning, and co-edits Whiskey & Gunpowder. He also runs stock boards on the Motley Fool, Silicon Investor, and TheMarketTraders. He is an avid photographer, when not writing about stocks or the economy, with over 80 magazine and book covers to his credit.

Today’s focus commentary is called Falling Dominoes and addresses the impact of Housing’s decline on the economy:

The [Massachusetts] state Division of Banks is cracking down this month on what it sees as abusive business practices by mortgage lenders and brokers.

The agency issued a series of new emergency regulations earlier this month, requiring better documentation from lenders and prohibiting them from pressuring consumers into taking out mortgages they can’t afford or working without their own independent lawyers. It also forced four companies — two of them located Worcester — to close immediately and place all pending mortgages with another, more established lender.

Commissioner of Banks Steven L. Antonakes said in a recent interview that division examiners found a pattern of deceptive business practices by some lenders during their most recent round of company inspections.

"We want to spell out in very plain English to send a message to lenders and brokers that these specific acts, whether they’re very obviously unfair or deceptive, or more subtle, they weren’t going to be tolerated," he said. "And you would put your license at risk by engaging in this kind of activity."

Abusive lending practices can destabilize the entire real-estate market. As an example, he described a hypothetical street containing 10 homes, each worth a certain amount of money.

"If loans were originated for two of those homes, in which the loan was made that the broker knows the consumer has no hope of repaying those loans, very likely the borrower will become delinquent," he said. "In the worst case, the home will be foreclosed upon, and that kind of activity could result in the home being sold for less than its value and before you know it, you have a domino effect."

But the slowdown has also put lenders in a tough position, said Christopher J. Iosua, president of the Mortgage Connection Inc. "When business slows down the way it has in the past six to nine months, new loan originators and those without a strong base of customers do things they probably wouldn’t normally do," he said.

The idea that lenders are doing things they may not have done in "normal conditions" may have some merit for some lenders but when 40% of the loans sold in California before the bust were either stated income loans or pay option arms, I think the idea if more fiction than fact. Anything and everything was done to keep the bubble booming, and that was as I said happening well before the bust.

With every bubble comes fraud. The two go hand in hand and housing is not unique in this respect. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the fraud that supported this bubble. Lending standards are going to tighten as a result, and will continue to tighten as more and more of the fraudulent activity is exposed. I consider fraud and tightening of lending standards to be two big dominoes that are now falling. Tightening of lending standards was previously discussed in Lending Guidelines / Credit Squeeze and The Blame Game.

We put together a short list of excellent but somewhat overlooked blog that deserves a greater audience. Expect to see a post from a different featured blogger here every Tuesday and Thursday evening, around 7pm.

First up in our Blogger Spotlight: Tim Iacono and The Mess That Greenspan Made. Tim is a software engineer in his mid-forties, living in Southern California. He calls his blog is a "vain attempt to stave off a mid-life crisis, and here’s hoping that it’s going to work."

>

Today’s focus commentary is called Friends in High Places? and it address the controversey we discussed last week.

>

Friends in High Places?

Life is always much more fun when there’s a good
conspiracy theory to kick around. When the New York Times starts kicking it
around too, then it can really be
enjoyable.Such is the case with the recent plunge
in the price paid for gasoline by formerly dour consumers leading up to an
election where the party in power is clearly having difficulty wooing the
electorate. It just so happens that the newly appointed Treasury Secretary used
to run the investment bank that controls the world’s most important commodity
index, which seven weeks ago cut the weighting of unleaded gasoline by nearly 75
percent, causing all commodity investments based on this index to sell their
unleaded gasoline futures.

For the same number of buyers, a glut of
sellers means lower prices, and voila! Prices at the pump drop precipitously,
consumer confidence rebounds, and the electorate develops a new spring in their
step.

Say Hello

About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

Quote of the Day

"Misers aren't fun to live with, but they make wonderful ancestors." -David Brenner

Sign Up For My Newsletter

Get subscriber only insights and news delivered by Barry every two weeks.